Reactions to First Footage from Quentin Tarantino’s DJANGO UNCHAINED

Earlier today, we got our first look at director Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited new film The Master by way of a brief teaser. While it was definitely great way to start the day, select folks over at the Cannes Film Festival were treated to something a bit more special. The Weinstein Company offered an extended look at The Master,Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook a few hours ago.

While us common folk have to wait a while to see anything from the aforementioned titles, we’ve compiled a round-up of reactions to the footage from Tarantino’s latest for those interested to see how the pic is shaping up. Hit the jump for more.

The most rapturous response (unexpectedly) came from Django Unchained. The Weinstein Company showed off seven minutes of footage, and we’ll kick things off with some Twitter reactions:

“‘Django’ gets the most whoops. Plenty of blood, plenty of laughs. Looks like it will be the Cristophe Waltz show. ‘The D is silent.’ #Cannes”

Now we’ll get to some more elaborate descriptions of the footage. First up, here’s what the folks at Vulture had to say:

“The big surprise? How funny this potentially controversial Western has turned out to be. In particular, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be having the time of his life dropping N-bombs and smiling rotted teeth as plantation owner Calvin Candie… You’ll get a periwinkle-suited Foxx shooting lumpy blood chunks out of racist hicks (and an innocent snowman in one scene), and you’ll laugh! You’ll get Don Johnson dressed as Colonel Sanders!”

Much like Inglourious Basterds before it, I painted a different picture in my mind, in this case a sweaty southern gothic story. But once Christoph Waltz shows up in his carriage with a giant tooth bouncing back and forth from the roof trying to negotiate a deal with a slave driver I began to get the tone… All the location work makes the film look huge, Foxx is at the top of his game it appears, Waltz is loveable, funny and dangerous all at once and it just feels like everybody is having a blast.

“What the footage reveals is that for the moment, while Tarantino has described the film as a “southern,” Weinstein Co. is selling this as a bang-up western, packed with physical comedy and bloody action and hell-bent revenge. And yes, it looks like a classic widescreen Sergio Leone western, even if the setting is New Orleans and Mississippi two years before the Civil War. (The music on the trailer ranged from classic Johnny Cash to James Brown. No Ennio Morricone here. As yet.)”

All in all, this sounds very, very promising; especially given that Tarantino still has a great deal of the movie left to shoot. Hopefully we see a teaser trailer relatively soon so we too can marvel at the promise of a new film from Quentin Tarantino.